Living and Breathing
by DisguisedasInnocent
Summary: It hurts to breathe in and out. It hurts to keep going. Those around her push her forwards but all she wants to do is to fall. Quinn doesn't want to fight, she just doesn't want to hurt any more.


_Author's Note: Sometimes I wonder if Quinn wanted to live any more after the crash. I mean, at that point she didn't really have much to live for, she was on her own, she wasn't getting to see her baby girl and no one really seemed to be there for her. I wanted to explore that a little..._

* * *

You want to blame her. You want to yell at her and cry your eyes out because it hurts. It hurts. It's always hurt. She left you there, abandoned you in the middle of the worst storm of your life and there was nothing that you could do to get her back. She stopped calling, stopped texting, and stopped loving you and it hurts. It hurts worse than the fire that is spreading down your spine. It hurts worse than the ice that is piercing through your lungs. It hurts worse than the strongest alcohol burn you've ever experienced in the back of your throat. It hurts worse than giving birth.

Everything hurts. There isn't a patch of your body that doesn't ache in some way and there is nothing that you can do to stop it. The place on your forearm where her hand rests aches as if her touch itself irritates your skin and you want to scream but you can't. You can't open your mouth to say the things that you've been trying to say. You can't force your lips to part in a way that will allow words to flow from your mouth and into her ears. You want her to listen to you for once in your life but you can't make your throat work to create the sounds.

You know there is a pipe sliding down your throat, fixed into place by a series of straps around your mouth, allowing you to breathe evenly and steadily. You don't want to be breathing. You want to cry but your eyes won't let you. You can't open them, tears leak from the corner of your eyelids every now and then but you can't force your eyes to open wide enough for someone to recognise that you are awake. You don't want to be breathing.

You haven't wanted to for a long time, perhaps because you didn't want to be bothered any more. Everything hurt and nothing made it better. For a short time, the drugs and the alcohol took away the pain, but then they added more, you couldn't breathe through the smoke and then you could barely see. You don't know what you're thinking now, floating around through the morphine and the pain, the pain that you've tried to tell them is too much. The morphine doesn't override it, it doesn't block it out and you can feel every single one of the sparks that slide through your nerves, breaking you apart from the inside out. You want to tell them, you want to scream it at them, but you can't.

Sometimes you want to cry, sometimes you want to scream, but most of the time you just don't want to feel. You don't want to feel her hand on your arm, or her fingers on your face, or her breath on your cheek as she leans over to kiss your forehead. You don't want any of that and you can't tell them that. You just can't and it hurts.

It hurts not being able to do or say anything. Your legs aren't listening to you, your fingers are muddled and confused, your eyes are blind and it hurts. When you gave birth, you thought that nothing would ever hurt more, and you suppose in a way you were right, after all, this time you don't have a heart to be ripped from your chest at the sight of the perfect little being in your arms that you will have to let go of eventually. None of them understood that pain, not even her father, but you hurt every day she wasn't in your arms and every moment that she was. There wasn't a moment that you didn't hurt and eventually your walls fell and they had to see some of the pain. The pressure crashed around you and it hurt. It hurt so badly that you couldn't breathe or think or feel any more. It was heaven and hell at the same time.

People wonder what will happen after death. Some of them want there to be an endless world of wonder and happiness at the other end, some of them want there to be nothing, you just want to not be in pain.

You want to give up and give in. You want to tell them to let you die, but you can't. You can't tell them and so you go on living in the darkness of a world that you do not want.


End file.
